The Deliverance
BARDO, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths
The Bloodhound
Ice Cream in the Cupboard
Life in a Year
The Lower Angels
The DeliveranceNow streaming on Netflix.
BARDO, False Chronicle of a Handful of TruthsI started work on this film near the time when the director’s cut was just finishing. My first order of business was to watch the film, projected, in the facility’s theater. At the time, the film was three and a half hours long and when I finally pressed play I knew there was no way I’d be done before my workday was over. But after watching back only three of the reels, I knew I was involved with a masterwork and couldn’t pull myself away. The VFX were still rudimentary and the dialogue had not yet been subtitled into English so I could understand very little of what they were saying, but I was completely in awe. It felt wrong to put the film on hold until the next day - so I stayed late into the night relishing every reel.Later, as we were approaching the Venice Film Festival deadline, much of the editorial team was put on a hiatus to save a little money while the VFX team caught up to us. Luckily for me, I was still working over that hiatus and was asked by Alejandro if I would be available to do some editorial ‘exercises’ with him. And so for a day in this process I was able to sit with AGI and edit with him. We fine tuned some pacing, tweaked some performances, and made some excellent changes. It was a wonderful experience and it’s something I’ll never forget.Watch on Netflix
The BloodhoundUnder the influence of chess, green tea, and between reading passages from the Tao, Pat and I cut this gem of a picture. The Bloodhound is a feature length exploration of themes we first tackled in The Living Ghost: old friendships, uncanny happenings, and confinement.In terms of editorial work, I think Pat puts it best when he says that the film has a ‘certain Cubist quality’. Meaning that in the same way Cubism compresses spatial planes, The Bloodhound collapses planes of consciousness - allowing dream logic to function in the same space as reality. To that effect, we worked on blurring the lines between what feels dreamy and what feels concrete.While at times dreamlike, the editorial style in The Bloodhound also has a deliberate quality - like a chess game. We thought of each cut and each angle as the movement of a piece advancing the game - moving toward its inevitable end.Watch on Arrow PlayerWatch on Amazon Prime
Ice Cream in the CupboardIce Cream in the Cupboard is my second feature and first since graduating the AFI. It’s a seriously evocative film. Drew and I worked tirelessly to strike a delicate balance between the comic absurdity of living with and caring for a loved one suffering with Alzheimers and the deep sadness of it. Narratively, we found ourselves navigating between what is honest versus what is disease. We strove editorially to reflect the experience of Alzheimers both through a factious narrative structure and by carefully integrating memory as powerful punctuation - while one character loses hers another character finds solace in his.In terms of the delicate character editing, it was our responsibility to keep Carmen real and human, even in her lowest, most dissociative moments, which lent us the opportunity to create sequences steeped in realism, bordering on the surreal.First Place, Best Feature Film NarrativeWatch on Amazon PrimeWatch on YouTube Movies
Life in a YearOn feature films, you always have a giant wall with a grid of 4x6 index cards with pictures of each scene represented. We call this the ‘card wall.’ I remember pacing back and forth in front of the card wall with Matt and Mitja taking scenes down, moving them, throwing them on the floor, pulling our hair out to try and get the story just right.I have fond memories of working on this film and when I watch it back I realize that I actually ended up cutting more many more scenes than I remembered - and Matt was generous enough to let me do that. Mitja would run back and forth between our two edit rooms - giving notes in one and then rushing to the other to give notes there. We took a lot of pride in getting the story perfect. Trying to weave in those flashbacks at the essential beats to heighten the emotion of the moment without stepping on the performances. And with Mitja’s boundless energy it really was a fun and frenetic editing experience.Watch on Amazon Prime
The Lower AngelsThis was my first feature and I was lucky to get it. Adam and I worked tirelessly on this ambitious project. It was while working with him on this film that I realized editing was the thing I absolutely had to do with my life. The conversations we had about character, plot, rhythm, meaning, motivation, and life were precisely the conversation I wanted to have day-in day-out for the rest of my life.Editing the film was no walk in the park. We started with a 4.5 hour rough cut and somehow were able to chip away at it until we had what we felt was a tight, effective film. Some monumental changes were realized only days before deadlines would arrive - giving us a sense of exhilaration and a film the sense of an aliveness. The major narrative choices we found ourselves making were about the film’s various storylines - how to navigate them, how to maintain the suspense, and subvert expectations. In the end it is a beautiful, gory, art-film full of honesty and love - wrapped inside a reimagining of vampiric tropes. Every time I’ve watched it I’ve realized something new about the layers we wove.
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